


a touch so light on the sand

by virdant



Category: Star Wars - All Media Types
Genre: Food, Gen, Post-Order 66, Tatooine (Star Wars), Tusken Culture, Tusken Raiders (Star Wars), Worldbuilding, agriculture in a desert world
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-08-10
Updated: 2020-08-10
Packaged: 2021-03-06 04:48:49
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 832
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/25817566
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/virdant/pseuds/virdant
Summary: Obi-Wan settles in the desert of Tatooine, and he settles to hide, letting the sand cover him until he appears to be one with the desert itself.Obi-Wan, living in Tatooine post Order-66, learns about deserts, and how to survive in them.  But for all that deserts appear bleak and dead, they are more alive than they appear.The desert appears barren only if you do not know how to look.
Comments: 3
Kudos: 126





	a touch so light on the sand

**Author's Note:**

> Sometimes I sit and think about food in SW planets.

There are no plants around the moisture farms. When Obi-Wan reaches into the Living Force, it is stale beyond the bright flicker of the humans who run the farms. The vaporators drain the scant moisture of Tatooine from the air, guzzle it, and there is little left for plants to grow.

* * *

The twin suns of Tatooine blaze. Every morning they rise and scorch the sand, every night they set to leave the planet shivering cold. Residents know to retreat indoors during the hottest and coldest times of the day. Tatooine thrives in the warming mornings and the cooling evenings. Other times, the only sound is the wind rustling the sand.

Crops do not grow well, on Tatooine. It is too hot during the day, too cold during the night, too dry all of the time. The only plants that seem grow are desert shrubs, tough things nestled in the rocky crevasses of the cliffs, buried under sandfall. The only part of them that are edible for humans are the new shoots, pale and soft, quickly hardening under blaze of the twin suns.

But the bantha that graze across the desert do not mind the tough shrubs. They chew and chew, ruminants that they are, biting through the tough stems, the hardy leaves, but never beyond the root. The plants of Tatooine are strong, like its people, and as long as some roots remain, they grow back. 

The desert appears barren only if you do not know how to look.

* * *

When Obi-Wan settles in Tatooine, he buys food from the settlements at first. There are attempts at farms and gardens, kept alive with careful splashes of water. But much of the food in the settlements are imported, brought in from Hutt space or agricultural planets rich in water. The Hutts manage the imports and exports, and what is available changes perpetually, prices fluctuating as the Hutts deem.

For a while, he buys rations of dry goods and water from the settlements. He travels in the morning while the sun is rising, takes shelter in the settlements during the hottest time of the day, returns back to his home in the Wastes in the evening. He trades goods for his steadily dwindling supply of credits and in exchange for odd jobs.

But eventually, as he runs low, he turns to the desert.

The bantha herds do not wander randomly. They graze under careful guidance of the Sand People, who are bitter and fierce and loathe to interact with Obi-Wan, human that he is. They’ve watched their desert drain dry from the vaporators, watched the land in their custody shrink steadily and steadily. They are angry, as the desert is encroached by settlers, and Obi-Wan, for all that he lives in the caves instead of the settlements, seems too much like them: pale and transplanted.

The Sand People are native to the planet. They know how to work with the land rather than try to twist it to suit them. They wander the desert with their herds of bantha, directing them to graze carefully so no part is too heavily grazed, so that the hardy plants that grow in crevasses and underneath the sand dunes will always grow back.

From them, Obi-Wan learns which plants hold reservoirs of water. He cultivates patches of growth in the rocky cliffs that he’s made his home in. He never sets up a vaporator, so that the desert shrubs continue to grow in the scant moisture of Tatooine air. When bantha wander by, he checks on them, guides them to not graze too deeply with a light touch on the mind. He grows familiar with the bantha of the Sand People tribes, comfortable with the way they pass across the sands. After a while of this symbiosis, the Sand People begin to trade with him. They offer jugs of bantha milk, jerky prepared from dried bantha meat. They teach him how to make flatbread from the dried roots of some of the desert shrubs. Obi-Wan begins to eat like them.

He does not live like them, nomadic and wandering. He is rooted in the caves, so he can keep an eye on Luke. But there is something familiar in the Sand People's behavior, the way they work with the desert instead of fighting it. The way their touch on the land seems so light as to not exist. Nonetheless the desert is cultivated under their watch.

Obi-Wan settles in the desert of Tatooine, and he settles to hide, letting the sand cover him until he appears to be one with the desert itself.

* * *

The desert of Tatooine seems bleak. But there is life thriving, if one looks carefully enough.

When Obi-Wan reaches into the Living Force, he can feel it: the bantha as they graze across the desert, the hardy desert plants, the lizards and insects making their home in warrens, womp rats that live in deep burrows.

And Luke, bright and blazing, hope growing in the bleak universe.

**Author's Note:**

> I'm no agriculture expert, but I know enough to know that European-style settlement and agriculture is a bad idea in desert biomes, and a more nomadic lifestyle makes more sense when the limiting factor is water, not land. That is... basically the launching point for this fic, which is an exploration of what food would look like in Tatooine. Sci-Fi has a lot of colonizing influence (exploration of the unknown, but the unknown is always settled by native people already etc.). So, SW isn't necessarily the most self-aware when it comes to world-building. But when we look at how Tatooine is settled by many different people, we can draw a few conclusions. The Indigenous people of the planet are the nomadic people (Sandpeople, Jawas) who live in the desert, the Hutts and people living in settlements are colonizers. The food culture of Tatooine is unlikely to be uniform, but you'd see two main camps: one would work with the planet, and one would bring outside influence. So these conclusions are how the story is constructed.
> 
> edit: after some long talks and research, it's been brought to my attention that tusken is short for tusken raider, which refers to (in legends) a fort that the sandpeople attacked, and that the sandpeople (again in legends) refer to themselves as sandpeople. until i get word otherwise from canon, i'll be switching my terminology over to sandpeople in fic. ty especially to void for providing links and giving me the good info!
> 
> anyways support indigenous stewardship of land! give land back to the native people.
> 
>   * Follow me on twitter [@virdant](http://virdant.twitter.com)
>   * [Like & retweet on twitter](https://twitter.com/virdant/status/1292685073498566658)
>   * Comment and kudo below
> 



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